About The Author

The Brief Bio:

Chrysoula Tzavelas went to twelve schools in twelve years while growing up as an Air Force brat, and she never met a library she didn’t like. She now lives near Seattle with cats, dogs, adults and children. They graciously allow her a few hours to write everyday and one day she’ll have time to do other things again, too. She likes combed wool, bread dough, and gardens, but she also likes technology, games and space. This probably goes hand in hand with liking Jane Austen, Terry Pratchett and Iain Banks.

I’ve been writing since I realized I was allowed to tell stories. My first attempts involved fanfiction about Han Solo (or possibly Muppets who were shapeshifters– the order is fuzzy), and inventing She-Ra before Mattel did. I even sent them a letter detailing my great idea. Or, well, I sent somebody a letter. I wrote a letter, anyhow. It was a long time ago!

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a friend with a computer. She and I would write stories together: I’d dictate our shared worlds and she’d type them in. I lost contact with that friend when we moved away (we were both Air Force brats) and I still hope to one day track her down again. Our stories featured lots and lots of magical pets: horses, wolves, falcons. I remember being enthralled by racehorse naming schemes, and coming up with huge spreadsheets of names. That… hasn’t really changed much in the last 25 years.

That story eventually fell prey to my discovery of the ‘format’ command. It sucks to be an inquisitive computer-obsessed adolescent playing around with poorly understood commands gained from voraciously reading inadequate help pages. Man, I wanted to learn how to program, and make magical companion computers that would talk to me and be like robots and always be there. Instead, I frantically printed out the single screen of my epic first novel that remained behind the error box complaining that the disc had been blanked.

That was probably one of the worst moments of my life at that point.

I went on to write other things, things that were increasingly more like stories and less like daydreams put into text. I wasn’t very good at finishing things, but I loved coming up with worlds and rules and characters. And I learned, and learned. And eventually, things happened to put me on the path to where I am today– but I think that’s an update for another time.